The text on the pages of this book, Manual, isn’t a traditional story. Look closely, and you’ll see it’s G-code, the machine language used to control 3D printers. Created by Studio Darius Ou with Benson Chong through their research initiative Hyperpress, the book contains a partial copy of the very G-code used to fabricate itself. In effect, it’s a 3D-printed book that contains the instructions for printing another 3D-printed book.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but what about its material? Manual is a 26-page book made of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), a flexible material that isn’t easy to print at “paper-thin” book scale. Getting it right took extensive testing to balance flexibility, durability, and print quality, and the designers ran into limits on how small the text could be printed while still holding up.
The mechanics behind the method
It’s printed using Hyperpress’s XY-for-Z method on a Bambu Lab printer. Rather than building up layer by layer from the bottom, the printhead works vertically and horizontally to print the pages on their edge rather than flat. That orientation is what makes double-sided pages and small, legible text possible. Moreover, it allows the whole book, pages, cover, and binding, to come off the print bed in one fully formed, continuous build. And for once in 3D printing, there isn’t even a post-processing step.
As you can imagine, printing thin, flexible TPU pages standing on edge isn’t without its problems. Its tall, narrow walls tend to warp mid-print. Hyperpress’s fix is a set of “deckle-edge supports,” temporary braces that link neighboring pages together while they print. Pull them away once the book is done, and they leave behind a rough, torn-looking edge, an unplanned nod to the deckled edges of old, hand-made paper books.
This isn’t the first book produced by Hyperpress. It’s the sixth, but it is the first to skip the separate printed layer for text and images that earlier titles relied on.
In this version of Manual, only 2.5% of its own G-code is written onto its pages. Hyperpress attributes the limit to current constraints in fused filament fabrication (FFF). Today’s print resolution simply isn’t fine enough, and text has to stay a certain size to remain legible. Put those two limits together, and there just isn’t room to fit the object’s entire code onto its own surface.
A blast from the past: Remember RepRap?
RepRap started in 2005, when Adrian Bowyer set out to build a 3D printer that could reproduce its own parts. By 2008, one machine could fabricate 48% of its own components. The remaining parts were limited to electronics and materials that couldn’t yet be 3D printed. Full self-replication? Like with the book’s G-code, it’s still the dream.
Adrian Bowyer didn’t work on that alone. Early collaborators included people such as Michael S. Hart, who’s better known as the inventor of the e-book, among the first people anywhere to put a book into digital form.
From e-book to r-book
You know what an e-book is, but what about an r-book? According to Hyperpress, Manual is a Replicable Book, aka r-book, a step past the e-book. An e-book only carries content across the wire; an r-book carries the object itself, physical form included. Hyperpress likens it to fax machines: those send a flat image of a page, whereas a 3D printer can send the whole thing, in three dimensions, out the other end. And if you really want to get technical about it, Manual’s pages are made purely of code, so the intended reader, in a sense, is the printer itself rather than the person holding the book.
That idea played out at Manual’s launch in Toronto. The file was sent digitally from Singapore, and the book was printed on-site in Toronto. Hyperpress has since made the print file available through its Patreon, keeping the loop from digital file to physical object open to anyone who wants to print one.
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*All Photo Credits: Hyperpress